


Plans and Reveries

by astrophrenia (closetplayground)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Flushed Romance, Gen, Humanstuck, M/M, Post-Scratch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-30
Updated: 2011-07-30
Packaged: 2017-10-21 23:42:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/231182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/closetplayground/pseuds/astrophrenia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the Scratch, the Earth is reborn, and the kids and trolls are reborn into it, living separate, human lives.</p><p>You are KARKAT VANTAS. Your whole life, you have dreamt of another life on another world, far away and in a different time. When you turn thirteen, the dreams turn darker. A doctor prescribes pills to make you sleep dreamlessly. The nightmares stop.</p><p>You never feel awake when you're not sleeping.</p><p>Three years after your last dream, you find him, and everything changes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Plans and Reveries

You are KARKAT VANTAS.

You are sixteen years old, and you would never even think to count age in terms of solar sweeps. You have lived on this planet called EARTH your entire life. Or that's how you remember it, anyway. You live with your DAD, and he is a HUMAN, just like you are. Your MOM walked out on you when you were a little kid. You don't remember her. You don't have many aspirations in life. You get average grades. You've never had a serious girlfriend, or boyfriend, or even best friend, just passing acquaintances. You don't have much motivation to change any of this. 

You do have dreams, though.

You dream of a world far away, in another universe, another time, peopled with strange ALIEN CREATURES, who are at once very alike to HUMANS, and very different. In your dreams, you are one of them. Your skin is a dull grey, your teeth sharp, a pair of nubbly orange horns sprouting from under your black hair. When you are awake, your hair is a dusty red colour, like rust on old metal. You have those kind of freckles that make it look like your face is dirty all the time. You've never filed your nails to a point. 

When you are awake, you feel like you're running in slow motion, like you're constantly forgetting what you were about to say, constantly losing your train of thought. Something feels unattached about life, when you're awake. Once, you told the counselor at your school about this, and they called it depression. You never talked to the counselor again. 

When you dream, everything changes. When you are asleep, you feel like you belong. In this fractured nightmare world your subconscious conjured up, you feel at home. You don't know why. Not yet. There's something fuzzy about your dreams that clings to your thoughts long after you wake up, whispering words in a language you can't understand when your eyes are open. Sometimes you see shapes in the clouds and for a second you get the strangest feeling that the sun is the wrong colour, and the whole world is nothing more than a movie set or an old building long since abandoned by sane people; that at any moment the whole reality of your world could be torn down by outsiders who've come to tell you that you had it wrong this whole time. Being awake gets so lonely sometimes. 

The dreams started when you were a kid, but they've gotten worse as you've grown up. When you turned thirteen, they changed, morphed into something different, something worse. You used to wake up crying, not sure why, feeling as if you'd lost something really important. You would catch your tears, and seem genuinely surprised when your hands, your pale-skinned, very human, hands, held only clear water and saline. You couldn't quite remember why you thought that this time for sure they'd be red. Your dreams gradually all turned to nightmares. You used to wake up screaming, fighting. Once, after waking, you ran down the stairs from your room to the only bathroom in the house, adjacent to your dad's room, and scrubbed your hands until they were raw, sure there was bloodon them, strange blood the colour of grape soda, that you couldn't get off. Your dad found you there, and he grabbed your hands by the wrists, stopped you from taking off any more skin with the sponge, asked you what was wrong. You just asked him if he knew what it felt like to kill your best friend. 

Your dad took you to a doctor after that, and the doctor gave you pills to make you sleep at night, to sleep and not dream. The nightmares went away. But that didn't make it better. The last three years have numbed you, turned you cold. The nightmares you used to have echo in your head when you're awake, feeling even now, somehow more than ever, like memories from a past life. Logic tells you that's impossible, though, so you just keep on living. 

You are KARKAT VANTAS, and you wouldn't call this living. You might call it surviving. You feel like you're missing an important piece of yourself. People stay away from you at school, in general. You look hollow, with dark circles under your eyes and a harsh look in your eyes, like you've lived through things the people around you can't even imagine. A girl with long, dark hair and too much eyeliner once joked that you act like a war veteran. You didn't laugh. 

It's been three years since you've dreamed. 

\---

You're on a trip with your school when you see him. Your history teacher has taken your whole stupid class to the state capitol building, told you a thousand times that there are going to be about twenty other schools there over the course of the day because it’s the somehundred year anniversary of some big damn important event in history or something like that, you weren’t paying much attention. Told you a thousand times, told you all to stick together, stick together, stick together. If you don’t use the buddy system, there will be hell to pay. But you don’t care. You see him from across the main floor of the capitol building, standing with his back mostly towards you, on a staircase, headed up, talking to a girl in a green shirt. You don’t recognize her, but you’d know his stupid head anywhere. You take off running, your tennis shoes squeaking on the centuries-old marble floor. You wind through the crowd as fast as you can, your eyes fixed on his ridiculous black hair, all sticking up and out in every direction at once, like it always did. When you shove into a group of kindergartners and a little girl falls down and starts crying, you don’t even look back. You don’t have time to care. This is the first time you’ve felt alive in years. 

The crowd is moving, taking him away from you, and you feel like you’re going to scream. You reach the stairs when he’s at the top of them, and fight through a crowd of middleschoolers. Your elbow collides with one boy’s side and he spits, ‘Hey, watch where you’re going, asshole!’, and shoves you back, jostling against the marble and brass banister, and you’re pretty certain that if you didn’t know what a bruised rib feels like, you will soon, but you don’t care. You don’t have time to care. You squeeze past him without a sorry or even a reciprocated insult. 

You reach the top of the stairs just in time to see him enter one of the showrooms, along with the girl in the green shirt, who you figure must be his partner. You wonder briefly where your partner is, down on the floor with the rest of your class, probably bitching to anyone who will listen to her that she has the worst class partner ever. You wouldn’t disagree. 

You follow him into the showroom, past a display case full of old Civil War uniforms. You stop running abruptly with a squeak of trainers on marble, and he turns around for the first time, the boy from your dreams. Your heart honestly skips a beat, and you wonder what you’ve missed in the last three years of dreamless sleep. You feel like there’s a box in your head full of all the important thoughts your brain hasn’t been allowed to think yet, and when his eyes, blue, like that stupid hood and those stupid pyjamas, the colour of wind and sky and breath, meet yours and seem to flicker with recognition, when he smiles faintly back at you, like he’s not sure why he’s smiling in the first place, you feel like this boy who is now within barely twenty feet of you has the key to that box. 

You walk towards him like a moth drawn to an open flame, trying not to stare at him, but it’s hard, because he looks almost exactly like he always did. He’s lost a little of the chubbiness that lingered around his cheeks when you used to dream about him, and he’s significantly taller than you now instead of just an inch or two like he was before, but he’s still got that same overbite, and those same dumb glasses, and that same smile. You never realized how much you wanted to see him smile at you like he is now.

You’re not sure what the protocol is for things like this, and you’ve never been much for that sort of thing anyway, so you just walk up to him. “Hey, fuckass,” you say.

His partner starts in on you, something about insulting random people without due cause, but he waves her down, telling her it’s okay. He looks confused, and he keeps staring at your eyes, your mouth, your hands, stealing glances up at your head. “You look different,” he tells you finally.

“Human,” you agree. 

He excuses himself from his partner, and somehow you’re both in the hallway outside, surrounded by people, but no one either of you knows - somehow your teacher hasn’t tracked you down yet, or maybe he’s given up. 

You stand there in a silence so thick you can’t believe you can even see him through it for several minutes until finally admits that he doesn’t know how to do this. You don’t have to ask him what he’s talking about. You’re not sure either.

“What do you remember?” you ask him cautiously. 

“What do you mean?”

You laugh bitterly.  “Dad got a therapist to prescribe me sleeping meds three years ago. I haven’t dreamed since just after, well...” you trail off. It’s strange to think that you’re talking about this with him, or really just that you’re talking with him at all. Logic dictates that what the two of you share, these memories you both have, shouldn’t be possible. You shouldn’t be able to care about someone who you’ve never met when you were awake. But you do. You try and remember what you were saying, and finally you remember, and you say softly, “I haven’t dreamed since I killed Gamzee.”

Something like pain flickers through his eyes, like little storm clouds passing through a perfect sky. “So you don’t remember anything from after that?”

You shake your head. 

He gets this look on his face that makes your heart twist into a knot, into a thousand knots. You think that he has no right to look so sad, that the emotion looks all wrong on his face. You want to slap him, but you don’t want to hurt him. You don’t know what to say. 

He closes his eyes, drawing a deep breath in, and looks back up at you, an expression you can’t read on his face, somewhere between hope and reckless abandon.    
  
And then

and then

somehow his hands are in your hair, faster than a bullet out of the barrel of a gun, and he mumbles something that you don’t quite catch, and suddenly his lips are on yours.

You pull back instinctively, recoiling from the sudden physical affection, a touch that feels alien to you but seems to be coded into his DNA, and you wonder not for the first time what you missed these last three years.

“Sorry.” He isn’t meeting your eyes, “I guess I thought...” he shakes his head, and turns, as if to walk away.

You reach out, grab his arm, don’t care if every schoolkid in the state is teeming around you, watching the episode unfold in little segments as they walk by, pull him back to face you again. “Don’t fucking apologize,” you say, your lips tingling with electricity, like absolutely nothing you’ve ever felt before, awake or asleep. Your heart feels, to put it mildly, like it’s about to explode. “Give me a fucking second before you walk out on me, okay?”

He grins that stupid bucktoothed smile of his, somewhat sheepishly. “You’re starting to sound like the Karkat I’m used to now,” he tells you.

Something about him saying your name like that makes it all sink in, makes your heart stop beating, makes your head buzz and your breath catch and all along this was it, this was the key, and as the feeling of the kiss fades from your lips, you can feel the lock on the box in your head clicking open, and it all comes flooding back to you. 

You’re reeling, and he catches you, and that’s pretty weird too, because he really is a lot bigger than you. He was always such a kid. You were all just kids, of course, but he was one of the only ones who really looked like it. “You’re kind of short,” he points out, and you scowl at him. You shove his arms away and stand on your own, to prove you don’t need help to stand up, but as the last of your memories click into place, you wish you hadn’t made him stop touching you.

“John?” 

“Yes, Karkat?”

“I’m glad you’re real.”

\---

You are KARKAT VANTAS. You don't need pills to sleep anymore, because the bad dreams are gone. You have normal dreams now, like you used to, before Sgrub, and the Scratch, and Sburb and the other Scratch after that. You learn to live with your memories, and on the weekends you meet up with John, who lives in a town about half-hour's drive from the one you live in, and you look for the others.

You find Rose overseas, in Europe, first. She doesn’t believe you when you say who you are, because she’s clever, and because, well, you were never ginger before, but when you finally get her to agree to opening a Skype line with John, you swear to gog she almost starts crying. John starts a little coin jar in his room, collecting change to save up for airfare to go see her someday.

John makes contact with Vriska next, over some social networking website; she’s up in Canada somewhere. Vriska gets you talking with Terezi, Aradia, and Dave, who she’d already found somehow. John spends hours on the phone with Dave, and with Rose, and you don’t blame him, but you get a little jealous sometimes when he talks about the stuff he talks about with them. Once, you tell him this, and he reminds you that you’re the only one he’s seen in person yet. You feel better.

About four months after you first find John, you get an email from Sollux. 

The others show up gradually, harder to find than you would have expected in the modern age of technology. A lot of them don’t have profiles on the websites that would make it easy to track them down. Long after you and John, and the others, have found Nepeta and Equius (who were born into the same town somehow, as if the new universe knew better than try to separate them), Feferi, Tavros, and Eridan, who you don’t remember ever being so glad to see, even after Kanaya surfaces (she took an extra effort to find, having been born in Finland and speaking English as her third language), there’s no sign of Gamzee, or Jade.    
John acts like it doesn’t bother him, but you know it does. You know he wonders why the pair of them weren’t born as real, blood siblings in this new reality, and instead why they’ve been scattered gog-knows-how-far away from each other, across a planet they helped to save. 

He tells you he’s never going to give up searching for her. You say you’ll never give up helping him.

\---

You stay together through the end of high school, go to the same college. John jokes about becoming a biology major, and you laugh along. He winds up majoring in film studies. He finally saves up enough in his stupid coin jar to visit Rose, but he winds up giving the money to Dave, because Rose can cover her own ticket with family cash, and Dave hasn’t really made it on the music scene like he’d hoped quite yet, and the two of them fly in to stay in the apartment off campus you and John live in together. You were never very close with either of them before, but everyone seems important to hold on to now, in this life, because these people, these fourteen scattered people, and the two you can’t find, are the only relics left of that old life left. Their memories, lining up with yours, are the only testimony you have that any of it ever happened. The fact of the matter is, you feel less crazy, and less alone, being able to talk about the things you remember with people who remember them too. Things were weird at first with people like Nepeta and Tavros, people who died before the Scratch. Their memories, and their dreams, ended before the other’s did, and no one wanted to remind them of it. 

Rose visits again a few months later, in the summer, and this time she brings Kanaya with her. Kanaya sounds different than you remember - it’s her Finnish accent - but her arms feel the same when the wrap around you after you run to her across the airport terminal. She’s tall like Dave is, but you don’t care, because for all that you talk to her constantly now, you missed being close to her. The four of you go out to dinner that night after their flight gets in, after their stuff is dropped in the living room you frantically tried to clean that morning when John reminded you that they were flying in. There are pillows and blankets shoved behind the couch, plates stacked in the dishdrainer that don’t quite have all the food cleaned off of them. 

John’s car is too small to hold all of you, so Rose and Kanaya share a seatbelt, Rose practically sitting in your old moirail’s lap, their hands twined together like synergy, leaning over every five seconds to whisper in her ear. John tosses little balls of wadded up paper at you from the driver’s seat. Different people show their feelings in different ways.

\---

Somehow, John winds up class valedictorian for his department’s graduation. He thanks you, and the rest of your old friends, though not all by name, right after Nicholas Cage, naturally. You’re walking out of the auditorium with him, casually joking about the implications of the string of flowers he has around his neck, when he stops dead in his tracks.

“Hi, John!” a voice calls from a through a crowd of graduation robes with faces, people who you’ve never met but seem to know John. You get protective in situations like this, your hands curling around his arm and holding him tight, because you don’t want to lose him again, even though you know, logically, that won’t happen. You look up to find the source of the voice, to see where John’s staring, and you see a woman who looks to be about your age, early twenties, with short hair, black with a streak of green in the front, coming towards you. You figure she must be another of John’s classmates. You never got to know this many people in your department, but then again, you’re not the bubbly personality and stupid charm that John is, nor do you care to be. You have the people who matter back, so why bother finding new people? If there’s a part of you that blocks any new connections because you’re scared that somehow you could lose them like you lost everything after the Scratch, well, you’re try not to think about it.

When she gets up close to you, John is still not moving, and she has a massive smile on her face that seems familiar somehow, and then she squints and looks into your eyes with a piercing stare for a second and says, “Oh, hi, Karkat!” and it hits you. 

It’s Jade. 

She doesn’t look thirteen anymore, but then, neither do any of you. Eridan doesn’t die that streak in his hair anymore, and he wears mostly suits these days. Sollux hasn’t worn those tacky 3-D glasses since he was a kid, and instead he plays up his duality thing, which isn’t so extreme here, by having little red and blue plug gauge earrings. Everyone is taller. 

John doesn’t move until you let go of his arm for the first time since he stepped off the stage and practically shove him into Jade, who hugs him enthusiasm and cheeriness that does nothing to betray how long it’s been since she last saw him. When her arms tighten around him, he collapses into her, and he actually cries a little. It turns out she’d been tracked the two of you down for a while, but, in her typical Jade style, she was very sure that she had to come out of the woodwork now, not before. 

John doesn’t spend his nights on the computer anymore after that, searching for her, running searches on every website there is. Of course, of all of you, Jade would be the one to be impossible to find until she wanted to be found.

\---

You are KARKAT VANTAS. You are thirty years old. You are getting married in a few months, unless John has to put the date off again to deal with yet another interview, or filming date, or something. He’s being hailed by critics as a genius of the silver screen. You’re not surprised. He’s got a lot of really good material to work from, and his taste has matured since when you first met him, a goofy kid obsessed with Nic Cage movies. He’s really got an artist’s eye for the camera.

Sometimes, when you’re so caught up in each other, you can feel his hands searching along your scalp for the horns he’s never really touched, that you’ve never really had, just as sometimes you are still startled to remember that you are not alone in the colour of your blood. 

You’re at a concert, a show you wouldn’t probably have gone to had the headlining act himself not shipped a pair of backstage all access passes to your door with a note, handwritten in red pen reading, “you assholes better be there,” a few weeks ago.

John’s backstage, with Rose, Dave, and Jade, just the four of them, just like old times. Really old times. So you step out for a breath of fresh air, into the alley behind the concert hall. You see a figure crouched over by the curb, probably just a homeless guy by the looks of him. He’s a little unsteady, so probably drunk, but he’s reaching for something, something laying in the street. You’re curious, and you haven’t got much better to do for now, so you watch him, wondering what it is.

He laughs, this low, lilting sort of laugh, and then he straightens up, his eyes fixed down on whatever he’s picked up. 

The sound of what is most likely the horn from someone’s bike rings through the night air. 

He turns around, eyes meeting yours slowly, his recognition delayed, inhibited by your rusty red hair and the age between the you he knew and the you you are.  The dirt smeared on his face almost looks like a clown mask.

“Motherfucking miracles,” you whisper.

\---

You are KARKAT VANTAS. 

You were the Knight of Blood.

But now, you’re alive. 


End file.
